Germany Intent On Speed Up The Expulsion Of Algerian Migrants (“Harraga”)

The German Government wants to speed up the deportation of asylum seekers from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia by including them, together with Georgia, as part of “safe countries”, according to a draft law adopted on Wednesday by the German Council of Ministers.
This is the second attempt by the German authorities after a first draft law was rejected last year by the upper house of parliament, the Bundestag, because it failed to find a majority owing to an opposition from the Greens and the radical Left Linke party.
In concrete terms, the German Government wants to include these three Maghreb countries and the former Soviet republic on its list of so-called ‘safe’ countries, as is already the case for the non-European Union Balkan countries, which would allow the immigration services to reject their nationals’ asylum applications almost automatically, without even having to justify these refusals.
Berlin justifies this decision by the fact that almost all asylum applications from these countries have already been rejected by more than 99% notably for Georgia and Algeria.
Only 2.7% of Tunisian asylum applications and 4.1% of Moroccan applications received a positive response from the German authorities in 2017.
The Ministry of the Interior, in the hands of the very conservative Bavarian Horst Seehofer, hopes that this measure will have a “signal effect” and allow “a drastic reduction” in asylum applications from these four countries.
According to an official report, Germany received 4,130 asylum seekers from the Arab Maghreb countries in 2017 compared to about 8,000 in 2016 and about 25,000 in 2015.
Last year, German media reported that according to Ministry of the Interior data, the authorities deported 119 rejected asylum seekers to Morocco (61 in 2015), 169 asylum seekers to Algeria (57 in 2015) and 116 asylum seekers to Tunisia (17 in 2015).
According to informed sources, the number of asylum seekers who must have left Germany in 2016 included 3,700 Moroccans, 3,784 Algerians and 1,515 Tunisians.
The number of arrivals of illegal migrants to Germany from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria reached 26 thousand people in 2015.
As a recall, the German Interior Minister visited Algeria in 2016 in order to convince the Algerian authorities to receive these immigrants after their deportation, but the visit did not produce tangible results.